Artist's Talk: Ibrahim Mahama

Mahama views art ‘as a fundamental human right, akin to justice, healthcare and water.’ In 2019, he opened the first of a complex of spaces providing access to art for communities in his hometown of Tamale in the north of Ghana. He works closely with the people this art centre serves, often employing hundreds of collaborators on his projects. Many of their faces are in Songs about Roses, in films, photographs and drawings. This celebration of human lives is threaded throughout his practice. The materials he uses – old archival papers, reclaimed leather, rusted train tracks – carry these stories with them. The rust, rips, stains, stamps and labels, are all clues to the history of a thing and the people who have touched and used it. For this exhibition, Mahama’s first in Scotland, he has made a new body of work that is in dialogue with Fruitmarket’s location above Waverley Station. For the last decade he has been collecting the remnants of Ghana’s colonial-era railway network, which operated under British rule. Using the carriages as sculptures, galleries and classrooms in Tamale, Mahama reclaims Ghana’s colonial past to build its future. He also mines the trains for materials, from leather to wood, to create artworks. With large-scale charcoal drawings, wall-based works made of tattooed leather, photographs and films, Mahama reflects upon the legacies of colonialism from the point of view of the colonised, shedding light on the complex and difficult histories of labour, capital and exchange that have shaped his country. His practice stems from a belief in the power of art to effect change. The exhibition is named after a song by Scottish band, Owl John – Songs about Roses – which urges us to ‘have faith that there is consequence in protest songs’. On the night we launched the new book that accompanies Songs about Roses, with imagery of this exhibition and all Mahama’s major work to date, plus new writing from Aby Gaye and Godelive Kasangati and an interview with the artist.